DollsArtCats

Two months and a lot of fussing later, we now have...a water lily. So far nothing has eaten it, or stepped on it. (It is sideways for some reason).

We decided that we probably needed fish in the pond to keep down the mosquito larvae, so we went to the pet store to pick up some minnows or something small. This particular pet store specializes in fish (they have some large, surly-looking piranha in the front in a tank, with a reminder not to put your hand in there) and this fish, as big as my arm, named "Jill". Jill was very lively, possibly because I looked like someone who might feed her. This activity meant all the pictures of her came out blurry, as my camera doesn't like low light. Eventually she might reach 300 lbs, and will need a larger tank. Anyway, we found the right tank full of half-inch long gray fish and bought fifty of them, and brought them home and released them in the pond, where they swam around merrily for about two hours before disappearing into cracks and the roots of the sea lettuce and hyacinths. The frogs were apparently unimpressed, or perhaps they just waited until we went to bed to eat s...

I hadn't fully gravelled the bottom of the pond yet, but the weather was calling for a lot of rain and I didn't want to bail out a muddy pit, or have the walls collapse--so I opened up my 99 dollar pond liner and stuffed it in the pond hole. The liner in the package is big, enough to do two ponds my size; but the plastic is only a bit heavier than landscape cloth, so I am guessing it will be good for one season before it will pop a leak or need replacing. But for a small, one season pond it should be ok for now. I put enough rocks around it that it won't blow away if the wind kicks up, and I will make it more presentable next week. There was a squirrel who was sure I was burying the world's Biggest Nut under the plastic--I told it that it was the only nut around at the moment. I think this was the same guy earlier this year:

Candy Kitten makes inexpensive eyes by hand in the UK, and if you don't mind waiting a bit, the result are very nice indeed. Not sure yet who will get them, but I will have fun trying them on various people. Aside from doll stuff, I did some yard work this weekend--I drained the pond and then J took away the old liner and I will put in a new flexible liner once I am over the flu (I kind of overdid the digging and rock hauling, but I wanted to get it done while the sun was shining.) I expected to find a gas line, or an electric cable, or the corner of the septic tank when the liner came out; but it was just a nice dirt pit, no weirdness at all. I think the previous owner may have pulled up the edges of the rigid liner because dirt was washing into the pond. I'm hoping having a flexible liner and building up the edge of the pond will do the same thing and look a lot better. It's looking pretty rough right now:

Yes, that is my pond under the snow. When it warms up, I will be draining it, pulling it up, repairing whatever is under it (probably some chipmunks and some snakes will be annoyed with me), put down a flexible liner, reline it with rocks, and refill it with small fish and water lilies. Assuming it warms up. J says it's only 7 months until winter, so it had better hurry up. But here is the pond a few days ago: You can see the fountain "spitting fish" now, and the plastic flowers. I would see those plastic morning glories occasionally and think, "What is coming up?" before I remembered that they are evergreens ;). Here is the pond on March 22nd: And now here is the pond today: So there is progress! We have some interesting weeds, including this prairie native: They are cute! I'd like to get more native stuff in here that is cute, and not thistles. :D It's easy to forget that all the ponds looked bad three weeks ago:

First of all, I received my Iplehouse Cherie head from Spain today. Nanyalin did her faceup and shipped her to me before she went off to the LDoll festival to debut her own line of dolls, so I was pretty excited. Cherie is not a "realistic" sculpt particularily--she looks like a doll, and so she was perfect to finally make Headless Merry into Merry Cherie. She is also extremely cute, and will be fun to load up with ribbons and flowers. It was also Fish Moving Day 2. The koi had gotten far too large for my bathtub sized pond (the biggest one was approaching 12 inches) and I was worried that soon small koi would appear. But Tony the Contractor has his own pond liner in, the waterfall and some extra bubblers and pumps ready, and rocks set up to foil raccoons, so yesterday he came and netted the fish and carried them away in buckets. He already has over a 100 fish of various types in tanks around his house so he was quite skillful at netting them, though the biggest koi was a...

Courtesy of Jenny Nemesis' crew. :D The Admiral seems to be the rainmaker; I am hoping to spray him this weekend..if it doesn't rain. J took out the trash cans this morning and came in to tell me that the pond filter was on it's side again..due to turtles or raccoons-- or as I suspect, changes in water pressure that push the stupid filter off it's rock. It has a side diverter from the fountain so you can adjust how big you want the fountain, but the plug piece is somewhere on the bottom of the pond from an earlier raccoon/turtle/chupacabra encounter, so the filter has a tendency to want to jet around the pond unless I set a boulder on it. So I stagger out to the pond (it's 7 AM, when decent people should be sound asleep) and J reminds me as I reach into the water to retrieve the filter to be careful of turtles. My opinion is: if a turtle, (or a Kraken, for that matter,) wants to argue with me before coffee, while I paddle around in a lukewarm, fishy pond at an un...

I haven't seen water hyacinths do anything but float around (and be eaten by koi) so I was surprised to see a bloom on this one. And stupidly I thought "Well, that doesn't look like a lily!" forgetting that they are hyacinths, not lotus-lilies. And they really do look like hyacinths: The other thing in the pond is the hard-to-read thermometer. Right now since I put in the plants, and the hay bale in the filter, the string algae has disappeared. I don't miss it.

He's not really my frog, but he lives either in or around the pond. I have startled him once or twice into jumping into the pond (I won't see anything, but I will walk up to the pond with fish food or dechlorinator or one of the hundred other things-in-bottles that have to be measured into the pond, and I will hear a splash and see something frog-kicking it's way down to the bottom of the rock pile.) We spent most of the weekend outside, me planting plants and J working in the shed, and that is how I happened to walk by the pond and saw the frog sunning himself on one of the rocks on the side. He stayed long enough to get his picture taken. I don't know what he's eating, but I hope he stays..and maybe invites a couple of friends over as well.

What is at the end of the rainbow? Books! And in our back yard, there is a rainbow of color, including the Ridiculously Photogenic Lilac Bush (which smells nice too, but doesn't seem to be attracting the butterflies and bees as much as I would like). I will try to put in a "butterfly bush" in the next couple of weeks. I spent a lot of time yesterday doing yardwork--the lawn now needs to be mowed almost every day (partly because the blades on the mower are set high), and the weeds are coming up as enthusiastically as the grass in some areas. And then there is the pond. Tony the Contractor is supposed to come get the fish, but as he is digging to make his own pond larger, I don't know when he will get over here. In the meantime, the pond was looking a little murky--it was time to change the filter media, so I had to go buy Bulk Filter Media. This is spun plastic mesh that you cut yourself to fit inside whatever filter you have, and since I apparently have a "un...

J's co-workers have come to expect "Baked Goods Monday" and he did not disappoint them--he made an "Almond Joy" cake which has 2 layers of vanilla cake laced with coconut, a center layer with a meringue, and then chocolate frosting with almonds on top. It was delicious-- but also so filling that one slice satisfied me for a couple of days. While we were sitting, eating dinner, I looked out--and there were ducks checking out the pond! Exactly like a couple going househunting--Mrs. Duck peering critically into the pond, Mr. Duck looking around for problems. This "bad surveillance photo" was the moment when he spotted the gray cat staring intently at him from the sun porch. They left, and so far they haven't come back, or I will have to cover the pond again. Because there is at least one fish in it! I went out this morning to add chlorine extractor to the bucket of water I planned to add to the pond later today (the bucket was frozen over, though)...

The koi pond is icing over, even with me prying up ice with the shovel--it ices faster than I can pry it off. I have bubblers, which are working again now that I have run miles of extension cord and are using 3 different outdoor plugs. The problem is the ice will grow around the bubbler intake tubes and choke them off, and then seal off the top of the pond, cutting off oxygen. My Aquascape 2000 de-icer has been a great disappointment, to say the least--it does not play well with the GFIC receptacle it is plugged into. So I hauled it out this morning. I was planning on returning it to the store, only to find that the receipt had somehow been lost inside the turtle-like top of the de-icer, and then fell out..in the pond...and is now glued into the ice in the pond, about 2 inches under and one inch up.You can see it by my cat's foot, where he is stupidly standing on the ice Anyway, the previous owner showed me the horse trough heater when she was removing some of her own stuff...

It's 3 degrees F, it's 6 AM, and I am prying ice off the top of the koi pond because I think one of the bubblers has quit. Also the ants had discovered the plate that had contained the last of the Williamsburg Orange Cake in the kitchen sink, and there was great (ant) rejoicing. (J cleaned the ants up). Also, something sinister is going on with my neighbor's pool:

I once thought that the nastiest household chore I have to do (and this includes all the cat-related gross stuff) was unscrewing the rosette from the bathtub drain, taking a plastic strip with hooks, and going fishing in the drain for hair logs. It turns out I was wrong. There is now the chore of unplugging the pond filter once every two months, reaching into the pond, and lifting out the filter in order to open it up and clean out the string algae growing on and in it. This is the inside of the filter. The brown thing in the middle is essentially a panty hose full of charcoal, and I have to find where I can order another one because they gunk up after a while. I've tried doing this cleaning with gloves, but I just don't have the manual dexterity to do it gloved up. So barehanded, I lift out the pump and dump it on the lawn; and then with a hose and a brush I scrub off the algae, picking off the worst lumps with my fingers. String algae grows fast. It looks liked cooke...